We have received hundreds of hate comments,
I cannot read them all, but I'm going to read you a few examples.
>> That's Matthew Hayes, the co owner of Q nightclub in Colorado Springs,
which was the target of a mass shooting less than a month ago.
To add insult to injury, they're getting hate mail.
>> I woke up to the wonderful news that five mentally unstable, and
lesbians, and 18 injured, the only thing I'm mad about is
that they had courage to subdue the wonderful killer.
I hope more shootings happened, have a blessed day.
The shooter was doing God's work, five less, not enough,
those that stopped him are the devil, all gays should die.
This is hate.
>> It absolutely is hate.
And it's hard to imagine feeling totally comfortable sending those hateful messages
to people who had just been through a pretty traumatic and tragic event.
A mass shooting at a gay nightclub where several people were gunned down,
five people died, 17 were wounded as a result.
And the shooter is obviously inspired by the anti-gay hatred
in his heart, anti-trans hatred in his heart.
And this testimony is important to hear about.
Because while we might talk about it here on the show, it's important for
these lawmakers to hear about it, both Democrats and Republicans.
Now this was a hearing that took place to kind of discuss how the rhetoric and
discourse in this country might fuel some to carry out acts of violence.
There were two victims of that shooting at the hearing to testify, and
also as you heard from the corner, he was there as well.
We got more video to share from the testimony, Jink.
But any thoughts?
>> Yeah, he's about to say something, I think that's the most.
But look guys, there's the gaslighting of society and
mainstream media etc where you're not supposed to say things that are obvious.
Republicans have proposed over 600 bills that are against
the LGBTQ community in just the last four years.
Republicans are the ones that are driving hatred towards gays.
And you could say broadly the right wing is you might find a couple of Republicans
who genuinely don't hate gay people.
But overall, the majority of the right wing in the Republicans are the ones that
drive that ideology is that the left wing that are saying, you should hate gay
people, they're sinners, there's something wrong with them.
My God, watch out for the trans, they're in the wrong bathrooms, wrong sports, and
he said no, it's definitely the right wing.
So the right wing creates monsters,
people who are unstable that could go in a lot of different directions.
An unstable person could get obsessed with random things, but right wing media tells
them, I hate gay people, I hate him, I hate him, I hate him!
And then they not only drive some of them to go pick up a weapon and
murder gay people as happened in this instance, but
then it drives others to write in and go, thank God the gay people were killed.
That's what my right wing media monster like Tucker Carlson,
you fill in the blank, Ben Shapiro told me, I told me to despise gay people.
By the way, so did my pastor, so did my Republican politician, and so gee,
I wonder where that hatred got into my head.
That's where it got from, it's the right wing that are creating these monsters.
>> Also, very likely self-hatred as well, right?
If individuals who were raised in a hyper conservative environment
might start feeling that they might be gay themselves.
I mean, that leads to a lot of self-hatred,
they lash out in violent ways.
So it's an incredibly toxic environment that we're currently living in and
what's further making it or exacerbating it is some of the lies that get
told about various individuals based on political motivations, right?
The groomer word gets thrown around left and
right just because the person claiming it, saying it doesn't like the political
opponent they're directing that language toward.
And it just creates an incredibly, hostile, dangerous environment for
groups of people that historically in this country and
around the world have been incredibly powerless.
Now as I mentioned, this was testimony before a house committee,
they're talking about hate crimes against various groups of people, in this case,
obviously, we're talking about the LGBTQ community.
And there were others who also testified, including 25 year old Michael Anderson
who's actually working behind the bar when shots broke out.
Let's watch.
>> While I prepared for my life to end in that moment, I prayed, I panicked, and
I prayed some more.
God must have heard my prayers because two brave men stopped the shooter moments
before he would have inevitably found me.
I saw my friend lying on the floor, bleeding out,
knowing there was little to no chance of surviving that bullet wound.
I had to tell him goodbye while I continue to fear for my life,
not knowing if the attack was truly over.
>> So he had to say goodbye to his friend as he was laying on the floor,
bleeding out from a gunshot wound.
And no one should have to go through that.
And in this country, people go through it
all the time because of the regular occurrence of mass shootings.
But this one takes it a step further, it's allegedly a hate inspired mass shooting.
Again, where five people were gunned down and killed 17 others wounded.
>> So look, we talked about the cultural wars all the time, so
does the right wing media.
And they say that it's a cultural wars are super important that Fox is obsessed with
them, etc.
What are the cultural wars?
Culture wars are be like us, don't be like them, they're the bad guys, right?
And both sides do it, but how do they do it?
So we tell you that they're the bad guys because they're driving hatred and
they're saying, okay, somebody's born gay, you should hate them.
You should hate, hate, hate them, and make sure that they're never mentioned in any
schools because their very existence is problematic, right?
And they should be banned from this place, and that place, and they should not have
the same rights as others and getting married, they should just be inferior.
They're inferior to us and they should have less rights than us.
That's a fact that the right wing pushes for that.
They put it into bills and they try to pass those bills, and oftentimes, they do.
That is a stone cold fact.
So anyone lying to you about that and
pretending that, I can't tell is that Democrats or Republicans?
Is it right wing or left wing?
They're absolute liars and they're lying on behalf of the right wing.
So we fight the culture wars and we tell you they're immoral for
an excellent reason because they are immoral, they do drive hatred.
Now, what do they say?
They say, no, don't worry about what that person thinks.
Don't worry if that person is kind or not, just hate them for who they are.
That guy's born gay, that bartender.
Well, I mean if somebody tries to murder him, I mean look,
he made a slight mistake, you're supposed to hate the sin and not the sinner, wink.
But in reality, of course, both all the religions, all of the religions,
along with all of right wing media and almost all of the Republican Party tell
you to hate gay people, and that they're different and inferior.
They're the ones that cause the goddamn hatred,
and yes, definitely the shootings.
So look, just quick note.
I mean, not all religions and not all interpretations of religious.
>> Not all interpretations of religions, but the fundamentalist interpretation,
the right wing interpretation of every religion.
Yes, does hate gay people.
>> Okay, so now that we've moved on to the right wing angle to this story,
which I think is incredibly important.
Republican congressman decided to use this hearing as an opportunity to draw
false equivalences between the right and the left in terms of their rhetoric.
And I'm gonna debunk what is about to be claimed.
So representative James Comer of Kentucky,
the ranking Republican on the committee denounced violence in all forms but
pointed the finger back at Democrats.
He says, quote, this is not an oversight hearing, this is a blame Republicans, so
we don't have to take responsibility for our own defund the police and
soft on crime policies.
We're not having a discussion right now about defund the police or
soft on crime policies, which to the, I guess distress of some leftists, I've been
talking about a lot lately, and I do not agree with them on some of those policies.
But nonetheless, we're not having a conversation about crime.
We're having a discussion about a hate inspired mass shooting where innocent
people were gunned down by a person who might have been motivated by some of
the garbage that we hear from conservative media and right wing politicians.
And I'll give you the latest example.
Latest example comes from the state of Texas, their Attorney General,
Ken Paxton apparently wanted to make a list of individuals in the state of Texas
who had changed their gender on their state issued ID or driver's license.
How do we know this?
Well, apparently he reached out to the Texas department of public safety in June,
and he asked them to compile a list of individuals who had changed their gender
on their Texas driver's license and other department records in the past two years.
What was he gonna do with that list?
Real interesting, and he did so
by essentially not going through the appropriate channels, right?
He went directly to the individuals who work within the like, I guess DMV, right?
I mean, that's where the driver's licenses are issued.
Now he said based on documents that the Washington Post has reviewed,
these were the communications amongst individuals working in the department.
Need total number of changes from male to female and
female to male for the last 24 months broken down by month.
The chief of the DPS driver's license division emailed colleagues in
the department on June 30th.
According to a copy of the message obtained by the Washington Post through
a public records request.
We won't need driver's license, ID numbers at first, but
may need to have them later if we are required to manually look up documents.
The records which document communications between DPS employees
are entitled AG Request Sex Change Data and AG data request.
They indicate that Paxton's office sought the records a month after the state
Supreme Court ruled that Paxton and Abbott had overreached in their efforts to
investigate families with transgender children for child abuse.
So just look at the accusations that get thrown around toward parents
who are accepting and loving toward their transgender children.
They're accused of child abuse by these right wing politicians,
anyone who might be transgender.
I mean,
just think about how the transgender debate was transpiring in 2015.
I mean, that's when things really started to heat up.
And they kept referring to literal students, transgender students who
might wanna use the bathroom that they identify with as sexual predators.
That was the branding that they used from the very beginning.
So when you're constantly putting out into the world,
into the country through your discourse that these are dangerous people,
they're looking to sexually assault your daughters, they might rape your daughters.
We should be so scared of them in a country, by the way,
full of people who don't have mental health care.
And very likely, in a lot of cases,
have mental health issues that are undiagnosed and untreated, great.
And then we live in a country, of course,
where we're swimming in guns at the same time.
>> So two things, first on the defund the police stuff,
as Anna said, two completely separate issues.
So, if they were related, we would tell you because we've been some of
you know being very aggressive and saying, look,
I think that there was overreaching on the issue of, sentence reductions, etc.
That's a very long and complicated story, there should be sentence reductions, but
they were done in the wrong way.
And what that has led to is, yes, an outbreak of crime.
It is real, so a lot of the leftists hate us for
saying things that are obviously true, etc.
But we're telling you, that has nothing to do with this shooting here.
Because these kind of shootings happen all the time under previous laws,
on these laws, it's not because they're like, there aren't cops around.
No, they do it, no matter how much security there is, no matter how
many cops there are, that has nothing to do with a completely separate issue.
But Paxton going around saying, who are the transgender ones?
Let's identify them and target them.
And then don't tell me that you're not immoral,
don't tell me that you're not trying to hate people.
Don't tell me that you're not trying to identify people that you're gonna go
after, because you're a disgusting pig.
By the way, this pig, Paxton is actually a criminal for seven long years.
The authorities have wanted him, he became attorney general in Texas too, so
that he can avoid the law.
He goes, I'm attorney general, and Republicans love criminals, so
they elected me.
So now you can't touch me, but I'm gonna target transgender people who've done
nothing wrong based on their identity.
Why do republicans try to misdirect you and
get you to hate people based on identity?
Because if you actually judge people on their actions,
the right wing would be in terrible shape.
They're like, no, no, no, not on actions, just on random features,
whether you're gay, or black, or whatever else.
Because if we looked at your actions, right-wingers, you're disgusting